Perfect dental management speeds close 3x in multi-entity environment, eliminates 3 days of manual work

Allison Burks, the controller at a 17-office dental practice in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, sums up what her company’s move to Sage Intacct has meant in a single sentence:

”We’re working smarter, not harder, with Sage Intacct,” says Burks, head of accounting at Perfect Dental Management, which supports the offices with centralized services for operations, HR, billing, credentialing, and accounting.

It’s a wholesale transformation from Perfect Dental’s days of closing the books and reporting with QuickBooks and Excel. The company has dramatically streamlined multi-entity accounting, and it’s got new insights into business performance to make more informed decisions.

As outlined in our new customer success story, Perfect Dental has:

• Accelerated its monthly close 3x, from 15 to five days
• Reduced multi-entity consolidation work from three days a month to four hours
• Cut payroll work from eight hours of manual entry to just one hour of checking and verification
• Saved one or two days of rounding up information for annual external auditing

A Better Work-Life Balance

Those gains aren’t just good for the business – they’re good for accounting staff, as well. Burks used to work 55 to 60 hours a week, with plenty of late nights in spreadsheets. With Sage Intacct in place since early 2018, her workweek is down to a manageable 40 to 45 hours.

“Adopting Sage Intacct has really helped make my work-life balance much better,” said Burks. “It gives me more time to spend with my 3-year-old son and my husband, and we recently bought a house, so that’s a chore. I’ve even been able to join a book club with my friends.”

Meanwhile, Perfect Dental has new scalability as it continues to grow. Founded in 2011, it added four new locations between 2018-2020, and its workforce has expanded from about 75 employees in 2017 to 130 today.

Despite the growth, accounting is handled by Burks and a part-time accounting coordinator. Greater efficiency has allowed the business to end its use of a third-party CPA firm that had helped out with accounting, saving more than $20,000 a year.

An End to Time-Consuming Data Entry

Burks is especially glad to be done with the double data-entry needed for multi-entity accounting in QuickBooks. That was a time-consuming chore as each of five entities had its own QuickBooks instance, but only two instances could be open simultaneously.

“Sage Intacct has cut down time significantly because it automatically records an inter-entity entry, and also uploads one journal entry with multiple entities on it,” Burks said. “Consolidation is a few checks after our entries are posted rather than going through every QuickBooks database and manually reconciling.

As Perfect Dental has found, automated multi-entity balance reconciliations have minimized the risk of human error and reduced time needed to research and resolve a discrepancy, while improving confidence in the accuracy of financial information.

And in payroll, the workload is down from eight hours of manual entries to just one hour of checking and verification. And when it’s time to add a new location or entity, that’s complete in matter of minutes with Sage Intacct — saving three hours of setup time in QuickBooks.

“Because we already have a chart of accounts set up for other entities, it takes five minutes,” Burks said. “It’s also easy to incorporate a new entity or location in reports — even customized reports will pull in a new entity easily.”

Improvements in Reporting Scope and Frequency

The time savings mean that Burks has more time to support the business with flexible, on-demand reporting through Sage Intacct, based on real-time data.

Insights into profitability and metrics such as labor, marketing, and equipment as a percent of revenue have helped guide decisions, including selling off underperforming locations and acquiring new ones.

“Sage Intacct has really helped drive our decision making because the numbers don’t lie, and that takes the emotion out of decisions,” Burks said. “It drives open discussions based on facts, not what we may think is happening.”

With Sage Intacct, Perfect Dental has expanded its scope of reporting to include specialties such as pediatric and orthodontic dentistry, along with locations and other dimensions. And it’s doing monthly reports with Sage Intacct, compared to quarterly reports via QuickBooks and Excel.

“We’re now able to present financials in a timely manner,” Burks said. “We can make changes in real time rather than a month or two after I present financials to our CEO and operations director.” That’s enhanced collaboration and communication across the business, and equips leaders to make data-driven decisions.

See our full Perfect Dental success story to learn more about how the business has transformed accounting with its upgrade to Sage Intacct.